by Teri Mclaren
Cheyne's dreams weren't the only ones in question. Before Javin could remount his dig, the Fascini heard about the hapless traders and permanently closed the caravan route, causing the elves to retreat into their magical forest, leaving no paths for outsiders through the curtain of light. As if that weren't enough, Javin had lost the support of future crew members-nobody wanted to go where the ores were so vicious. Barely escaping them three times on the way back, Javin knew he could never make it across the hostile lands of the Wyrvils again alone, even if he could convince the elves to let him in. So because he had troubled to care for Cheyne, Javin had lost his chance to dig in the Borderlands for all time.
So why, when Javin faced the same loss again, would he ever care about Cheyne's desperate need to search out his identity? The perfect sense of it dawned on him with stunning clarity. Javin had too much at stake here to be distracted by anything-a man like Javin, who, before he had found Cheyne, had lost two wives in foreign plagues, who now fostered no friendships and sought no roots-to such a man, work was everything. Javin's heart was set on this dig. Come the Fascini or the whirlwinds, he would not be denied this last chance to find the Collector's grave.
"Look, Cheyne, I've had enough. I'm going to bed. Muni has found a man willing to stand guard at the vault. We've taken out most of the sand, but there's still a corner full of it. The Collector isn't down there, but I'm sure that it's his house. Maybe he's on the next level, but we have to empty this one first. Think you can help Muni for awhile tonight, while it's cooler? I don't know how long before the Fascini come. We need to move as quickly as we can," said Javin, his voice strained with fatigue.
"Sure, Javin," Cheyne answered hollowly.
As Cheyne made his way up the dunes, the three sisters, first evening stars in this part of the world, appeared one by one in the deepening sky. Though the sun had set an hour ago, heat lightning still flashed in the west and the dunes still reflected the day's warmth on his face and hands. Soon the warm air would turn into a cold and constant breeze that would sweep over the site relentlessly until dawn.
Cheyne mounted the topmost dune as the blue dusk turned to complete darkness. He stood looking at the fading horizon for a moment, the peaceful view soothing the pain of Javin's disinterest. Some of the old palace's outer columns, invisible only a few weeks ago, ringed the site like silent sentries. Their basalt heads were chipped and cracked, or missing altogether. Still, they looked regal to Cheyne as they cut even darker silhouettes against the flashing sky. Behind him, the broken shell of a round watchtower, probably the tallest part of the ruin, rose in stark elegance.
He took out the totem from his tunic and held it to the sky, watching the colors in its edges dance with the lightning. He thought of the totem's glyphs and imagined that it was his name, his true name, carved there, sign of the beloved king of a great and mighty people, holding a just court amid those tall columns, his ancestors' faces carved in the stones behind him and looking on with approval.
He laughed aloud at the fantasy, sure that of all the pasts that might be his, this was not one of them. His voice echoed peculiarly in the columns just as the totem's edge caught a strong flash of lightning and the rainbow shot upward into the sky, the tight beam of colors softening to form the image of a woman's hand, her first two fingers oddly crooked at the first joint. Hie vision was gone almost before Cheyne saw it. Cheyne turned the prism in every direction, trying to make the image appear again, but the lightning moved off after a couple of minutes, and the sky was truly dark. He shook his head in disbelief, thinking the desert played tricks upon his eyes, that the lightning had deceived him. He put the totem back in his pack and moved on toward the vault.
The high desert air tasted clean and pure, and the brilliant white stars nearly outshone the large moon and its small companion. Cheyne often marveled at the little moon-it had been an integral part of every ancient civilization he had studied. In Argive, each record of the moon's advent was the same, though. One night it hadn't been in the sky-the next night, it was, and it had been there ever since.
It just appeared there, no way of knowing how. Like me, he thought as he trudged up the dunes to the vault, where Muni leaned casually against the marble slab they had moved that morning. It lay in the same position, the plaited ropes in their original knots.
"I am glad you have returned safely from your adventure. My apologies, by the way, for the assassin, though you acquitted yourself admirably. I had my hands full with his three friends."
"You followed me?" Cheyne looked at him incredulously. Muni smiled broadly, his teeth showing very white in the darkness.
"No. I took a dead man home. On my way back, I saw your predicament." Muni held the ropes up and offered him one end, securing the other one around his own waist.
Cheyne did not move. Muni sighed.
"Cheyne. You come and go as you will. When our paths cross, it is my calling to assist if I may. A simple 'thank you' will suffice, my friend." Muni bowed deeply, as Almaazan man to man.
Cheyne was glad of the darkness. It covered his embarrassment. For the first time, Muni had just acknowledged him as an equal and he had nearly let his anger make him a fool. He returned the bow and took the rope. "You're not going down?"
"No. Kifran and I will stand guard up here. I will feed you buckets and empty the backfill. The only things likely to disturb you inside are the living vermin." He smiled.
Kifran, a large, bearded Sumifan, saluted Muni and took his place by the tallest column. He was one of the men from the crew Muni ran, one of the few who did not believe in the old juma stories of an evil djinn which had once hovered over this place, bringing deadly sandstorms and making it uninhabitable, the very reason old Sumifa had moved to its present location. Muni's explanation to Cheyne had been more pragmatic: the community had simply outgrown its bounds, and the river had changed its course over the years, forcing them to rebuild across the Nantas to the west, where the town now rambled and sprawled, every so often adding another wall around the last when the population expanded. But the old legends had a hold on most of the Sumifan citizens-ask any Fascini's right-hand man, and the answer was the same. Old Sumifa had moved because it was destroyed by an evil force which still roamed the dunes.
"Muni?"
"Yes, my friend."
"By chance, did you see a tall elf in the city yesterday?"
"No, I did not." Muni laughed. "But if I had, or if I do, I will be certain that you are the very first person I tell."
Cheyne sighed and dropped down into the pit, the torch Muni had tossed in before him burning brightly on the newly swept marble floor. Several of Muni's despised vermin had scattered from the fire, and a couple of fancollar lizards, the scorpions' chief predators, skittered after them, their tiny claws clicking faintly on the marble floor. Nature seemed to balance everything, thought Cheyne, taking a bucket from Muni, scraping it full of sand, shaking it over the screen into another bucket, handing that one back up full, receiving another empty one.
The work continued rhythmically, uneventfully, for an hour, Cheyne's mind turning to his afternoon's adventure, wandering through the streets of Sumifa again, to Riolla's, to the fight with her assassin, to the odd helper he'd found and lost again so quickly.
What was it about this totem that made Riolla, the Mercanto Schreefa, want it badly enough to take his head? She had lied about the last glyph. Maybe she really did know what it said. Cheyne thought of the strange little man who had helped him. He wished he could have bought the beggar a hot meal or a bed for the night, even though he stole my last two kohli, Cheyne thought, smiling. At the very least, a loaf of bappir, that strange, sweet grain bread all Sumifans so favored. He vowed to himself that if he ever saw the big-nosed beggar again, he would find a way to thank him.
"Cheyne?" Muni called down. The empty bucket bobbed on its rope.
"Right here, Muni. Just thinking. Sorry."
There were only three or four feet of sand left to remove from the
corner. Then he could sleep. With a mighty pull on the bucket, Cheyne tore into the job with renewed energies.
Just then, the torch burned into a knot, flaring brilliantly for an instant, illuminating the dark corner where Cheyne was working. He stopped in midscoop, something in the cascade catching the sudden light. Cheyne stepped back for the torch and brought it close over the fine sand. Just under the surface, the thick lip of a pottery jar decorated with intricate, bright goldleaf markings caught the torchlight again, its crescent shape unmistakable. Cheyne braced the torch upright in the sand, pulled out his hand sweep, and began to brush away the thin layer of grains. In minutes, he had freed from its gritty tomb several shards of a good-sized clay jar.
"Muni! I found something. Besides sand, I mean," Cheyne called up in an excited whisper.
But his old friend had stepped away from the portal for a moment-Cheyne could hear him speaking sharply to Kit ran above, but could not make out the words. Agitation was not Muni's style. Troubled, Cheyne turned back to the shards, grabbed up the light, and shone it under the bright rim. More sand. He quickly sketched the situation of the find, then scooped his hand shallowly into the fragments, drawing out sand and letting the grains fall, their sharp edges sparkling like gold dust in the soft light of the torch. The sand inside the shards somehow looked redder and sharper than what he had been scooping away all night. And far more different from another kind of Almaazan sand-grains blown around for centuries in the high, towering storms of the eastern erg, settling to earth only when they became rounded, dull, and unreflective. There were supposedly great deposits of them hidden on the erg's surface. You could drown in sand like that, no water for miles. Just sink into the smoothness of it and keep sinking, until you were covered up. Like suffocating in silk.
But the crystals in his hand had been new when they found their way into the jar-as if they'd just been created, their edges sharp and faceted like little mirrors, catching the light in glittering waves. He ran his hand across the pleasantly rough grains, changing the pattern of sheen from the light, tiny rainbows appearing in the dark room for just an instant when the torch wavered.
Fascinated, Cheyne carefully dug more and more of the fine sand from under the mouth of the jar. When his hand struck the sharp edge of something, he leapt backward, thinking he'd been stung by a scorpion. Under the glare of the lantern, he saw a little nick on his hand instead of a sting and, relieved, took up his hand sweep to fish out a small, bronze-bound book the moment before Muni's face appeared over the portal.
"Sorry, Cheyne, I thought I thought saw something in the dunes-Cheyne?" Muni peered down into the vault, a slow smile creasing his weathered brown face. "You have found more besides vermin, 1 see," said Muni, delight in his voice. "What do you make of it?"
"What? Oh, you mean the shards!" Cheyne chortled, quickly hiding the small book in his robes. He wanted a chance to look it over before handing it up. There was writing, and once a linguist got hold of a book, it could be months before he saw it again. "Yes, I have. I don't think the piece is Sumifan, though-the designs and clay are wrong, don't you think?"
"Hmm. We'll need to see it in daylight. Your father will be pleased. And that won't hurt right now," Muni said knowingly.
"Muni, I'm going to stop for a minute and record the patterns on these shards."
"Good idea. Only make haste-we have yet to empty the room. And something feels very wrong about the weather up here. I think I saw some sort of shadow moving toward the camp."
"That 'evil presence' the men are always talking about? Surely not you, too, Muni?" Cheyne laughed and pulled out his sketch pad, quickly roughing in the odd shapes stamped and carved onto the pottery fragments.
He was finished long before he called Muni to resume the evacuation of the sand-time enough to examine the little book and decide it was without a doubt what (avin had been searching for. Now he'll understand why I have to find my past, he reasoned. He tucked the book into his pack, saving it for Javin's eyes first. Muni, he knew, would understand. An hour later, they left Kifran to continue the watch alone.
"It appears I was wrong about the djinn. I have neither seen nor heard anything odd for some good while. But the feeling remains. So, indulge me, please, and sleep in the mess tent tonight. I will take yours. May the sun find you well, may your sleep be dreamless." Muni bowed his night blessing and removed himself silently to the workers* shelter, leaving Cheyne outside the dark main tent. Cheyne shrugged, knowing he would be there all night if he tried to talk Muni out of his precautions.
Across the floor, under the netting on a low cot, Javin lay deep in sleep. Cheyne lit a small oil lamp and pulled out the book he'd found in the jar.
"Wake up, Javin." Despite his incredible excitement, Cheyne jostled his father's feet gently. "Look what I found." Cheyne produced the sketches first, saving the book for last and best, but Javin refused to move.
"Javin-" He finally held up the little bronze-bound book.
Javin snored soundly, stirring the netting about his face, the thin blankets tucked closely around the end of the cot to keep out unwelcome night visitors.
Disappointed yet again, Cheyne put the sketches on the table, sat down on the bench, and blew out the lantern. In the dark tent, his face toward the canvas, toward the east, he debated about leaving the little book for Javin to find in the morning.
He knew where the old pottery had come from. The signature stamps on it looked exactly like the ones on a matched set of grain pots Javin had said came from the Sarrazan forest. He had grown up with those two elven-made jars sitting at either end of Javin's big riverstone fireplace. And the elves' same signature glyph had decorated the tall elfs cloakpin. More importantly, all of them were originally word symbols in Old High Sumifan. Since he had first seen the elf in Sumifa, Cheyne had suspected the Sarrazan potters were the only ones who might still be able to read his indecipherable amulet and the totem's last carving. Now he was even more sure. But the elves lived in the Borderlands… past the western erg, past the Wyrvil territories, past the curtain of light. Beyond memory and time.
All right, favin. I tried. I tried before, and I tried now to tell you about what I have found. But all you care about is your own little square of trouble. Well, that's fine with me. You have done your duty by your foundling-educated me, and sheltered me. Why should I expect any more than that? You took your chance in coming here to follow your dream. I must take mine now. You save your energy for the Collector. It's time for me to look for my own past. Cheyne's face grew hot with pride and determination. His mind was made up. He would quit the dig-Javin did the really important work anyway-and go to the Borderlands, no matter how far, no matter how dangerous.
And I will not look back, he promised himself. / will never look back.
He quietly lifted the keys to the supply hut from their hook above Javin's cot. It would have to be a short night. Tomorrow, before the three sisters winked out again and Muni would rise to relieve Kifran, before Javin would sense the light and lift his head, fastening single-mindedly on keeping his precious work going, Cheyne would be back in Sumifa, finding a guide for his own expedition.
Across the dunes, in the new city, a whirlwind churned the sand into a scouring spray as it moved through the Barca, tearing the stalls down and scattering crockery, blinding three men and a shirrir-drunken woman as they reveled on the rooftops. When the wind reached the Mercanto, it blew down the sign in front of Riolla's shop, then moved over the Citadel with a new strength, finally resting, hovering over the tall spire that was the Raptor's tower. Seconds later, the sand fell to the ground outside the spire, cascading down the basalt stonework like a waterfall.
4
The old book he'd found in the jar fascinated him. The parchment was in excellent condition, the dryness of the sand and the air in the crypt having preserved it beautifully. Its bronze cover was somewhat tarnished, and still bore the blackened, faint fingerprints of the last owner; the binding was pulled just the tiniest bit
away from the spine. Oddly, for the book had obviously been well-cared for at one time, the last page of parchment was ragged and barely clung to the stitching. Flecks of something that looked very much like blood covered parts of that same page, almost as though something sudden and violent had happened over it. Cheyne thought of the bits of broken glass he and Muni had found in that same room and wondered if there were a connection.
He leaned against the Mercanto gates for a better angle in the soft dawn light, tried his magnifier again, but could not read the language. The last pages appeared to have been written with a steady hand, the style very tight and cramped, lines of Old High Sumifan carefully inserted between the other, unrecognizable lines. All but the final page, that is. The writing on that one was overlaid with more Old Sumifan glyphs, and the new words confused their boundaries; the bloodstains, for surely it was blood, blurred some of it also. Without time and the knowledge of the languages, it was impossible to sort them out. Still, Cheyne wondered why anyone would write over the other words-and the closer he looked, the more he realized that the glyphs were sort of burned onto the page, rather than inked.
If only I spoke Old High Sumifan. If only anyone here did. Anyone that I could find again, he groused, thinking of the elusive elf.
The long journey west he'd set for himself seemed more than he could accomplish in the clear morning light and the rising desert heat. By the time he'd slipped from the mess tent and slunk into the city again, miraculously finding the same hole in the outer wall he'd used the day before, he had also recalled that he would need to somehow get past the western erg, and after that, the Wyrvil ores' stronghold. Even sketchy memories of a quick run across the scrubland and salt flats of that barren waste when)avin had first brought him home were almost enough to check his confidence.